Fandom and the way it is

In this entry I linked to an article about Fandom and what it means to be a fan by a girl into the Slayerverse.

In the article there is a quote:

Jim Ward, Lucasfilm's vice president for marketing, offered his company's take on fandom: "We've been very clear all along on where we draw the line," he said. "We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is."

and you know, I just don't get it. In a real nut shell I don't think we ever just celebrate a story the way it is. The King Arthur stories and their constant retelling (even the canon is split into to versions: The Chronicle Tradition (England) and The Romance Tradition (France)) is often cited as one of the early cases of fandom - people retelling the stories to make them more relevant to their lives and their local context.

When I watch Buffy or House MD or Battlestar Galactica or Smallville or when I read Teen Titans or Outsiders or Harry Potter or Lucifer or Preacher, I'm not just reading the story as given. I finish the story, I pimp it to my friends, I talk about it with the people I know who've seen it. We extrapolate what's going to happen next and we talk about how we would have done things, or what we like about the way the writers have written things. Our fandom is not passive, even before getting into the fan production of fic, pictures, fanvids and playing Sims 2 with Clark and Lex and Bruce and Dick and Tim.

As soon as we put down the media we are immediately reinventing the text. We don't even all remember it the same, and some of the conversations are about coming to common ground about what the story actually was.

So I find it hard to understand the idea that a fan for a creative piece does not participate in the production and reinterpretation of its meaning. We do this through the conversations we have about it, and the characters, even when we engage with the ungarnished Star Wars (which the production company has reinvented itself - do *not* ask me about the last scene of the latest remastering of Return of the Jedi). In the end, I don't even think that there is a "story the way it is" and I do think that fandom and producerly activities enhance our ability to participate in the forming of meaning for these stories.